Pop Culture Grammar Bytes: Its Vs. It’s

What does pop culture (cartoons, manga, comics, anime, videogames, books, TV shows, movies, etc.) have in common with grammar? A lot more than you might think! This month, we're using pop culture to examine the difference between it's and its...

New Years Special: Reflecting on a Year of Your Blogs Part 4

In celebration of the New Year, I'm sharing out my favorite posts from 2017. These posts are all written by talented bloggers around WordPress, and I hope that you enjoy them as much as I did. Today, we're taking a look at blogs from June and July...

New Year’s Special: Reflecting on a Year of Your Blogs Part 1

Lately, I've seen a few fellow bloggers put out posts of their favorite posts that they've written from the year, and these posts have inspired my New Year's blog as well. Rather than reflecting on my own posts, however, I've decided to round up a few of my favorite posts from other bloggers and share them out as a thank-you to the WordPress community for writing them...

Holiday Community Collaboration Question: What About Stories Makes You Happy?

I don't know how December came up so quickly, but here it is, shepherding in all of its warmth and holiday cheer. Whatever holidays you celebrate this season, I'm wishing you wonderful ones. In the meantime, I wanted to celebrate and hear from YOU in another community collaboration project...

Celebrating 50 Followers! Come Share Your Favorites Collaboration

Pop Culture Literary is celebrating 50 Followers by celebrating YOU! I wanted to use this opportunity to invite you to share your favorite pop culture narratives. Talk about your current or all-time favorites from any pop culture genre (games, movies, cartoons, anime, comics, etc.). Share what you...

Family Dynamics in Gravity Falls [OWLS August Blog Tour: Bloodlines]

Everyone has their own experience with and definition of family –some positive, some negative. In the media, however, we often only see certain portrayals such as a positive family with one mom, one dad, and children, or a broken family who all work together to change their ways in the end. In his hit animated series Gravity Falls, Alex Hirsch tackles the complicated issues that shape families and addresses the fact that not all families are ideal, but that doesn't make them bad...

Tropes: When You’re Fairly Certain You’ve Seen These Odd Parents Before

Anybody that watches cartoons or anime is familiar with today's topic: the trope. Tropes act as a visual way for the creator of a work to quickly and easily convey a concept to their audience. They can take many forms-- a figure of speech, a character type, a plot device, a location or location type, a pattern of storytelling, a sub-plot. If you've seen the concept before, it is most likely a trope. Let's take a look at a few examples of tropes found in Butch Hartman's The Fairly Odd Parents.

Eight Literary Allusions in Animation: Celebrating National Book Lover’s Day

It's National Book Lover's Day, an official-unofficial holiday celebrating literacy and books. People often mistakenly believe that real readers only read novels, especially the literary classics such as The Scarlet Letter or Oliver Twist. That's not strictly true. Whether you read comics or novels, literary classics or fantasy, you are a reader. Books have been …

Pride in Pop Culture: A Celebration of LGBTQ+ Visibility(Part 4)

Tisibility matters, and can make a huge difference in a person’s understanding and acceptance of themselves as well as positive cultural shifts in how people perceive the LGBTQ+ community. Media representation can act as a double-edged sword, having positive or negative effects on a marginalized community depending on how the creator uses it. In honor of Pride Month and to celebrate...

Pop Culture and LGBTQ+ Visibility (Part 2)

One of the biggest concerns for the LGBTQ+ community involves visibility and positive representation in the media. Wider representation benefits the movement, as well as allowing individual members of the community (especially youth) to see themselves portrayed positively in the world around...